The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (22 page)

‘The only oddity I can find is that they are page proofs, not the finished article. There are a few pencilled corrections in the diagrams.'

‘Page proofs would be quite normal if Kren was rushing the new engine on to the market.'

The colonel was silent searching the eastern sky through the window, his thoughts seeming far away from the pages in front of him.

‘Now assuming the brochures were intercepted, the first move of the KGB would be to find the printer. There's no name. We must assume that the printer was a friend of Karel Kren. He need not have known what he was doing—neither do we yet—but he understood that he must destroy the galleys and all other evidence. Well, he couldn't possibly do that if the shop was printing, say, a thousand of the brochures. All his men would suspect something fishy. But he could—couldn't he?—run off a few page proofs and give the lot to Kren. Then the galleys would be burned and the frames emptied. You must have ordered advertisements and leaflets, Georges, in the course of your business. Does that make sense to you?'

‘Yes, for a small jobbing printer who could run the presses himself if and when he wanted to and was always short of storage space. As you say, he couldn't possibly do a long run but he could manage half a dozen page proofs and not leave a trace of type and galleys.'

‘And all this junk at the end—engine spare parts and numbers for ordering—have you ever checked the numbers against former brochures?'

‘No. They looked all right.'

‘Zia, what is the number of your uncle's division?'

‘The Third Armoured.'

‘Now this is just a wild shot, Georges. You see, I know what sort of stuff Lukash was sending us and what we hoped his next message or the message after would be. Look through that list of spare parts—it will be familiar to you—and see if there is any 3A anywhere.'

Georges ran his finger down five pages, closely printed, of engine spare parts.

‘Nothing,' he said, ‘except screw for magneto back plate. Number for ordering is H8923A. And just above it is spring washer for magneto back plate H8922.'

‘What's the good of the H?'

‘It refers to the illustration of engine assembly.'

‘Have a look for Ps!'

‘Drain plug P2642. Filler plug P2643c. Dipstick for filler plug P2645c.'

‘Karel Kren! By God, I salute him! Ignore the first number which only draws your attention to P for Poland. Then take the last digits of the next Ps, and read off Polish Third and Fifth Corps. And a very useful addition if they still fight as they did at Monte Cassino! Now R!

‘Screw for Inlet Manifold R9082. Gasket for Inlet Manifold R9083. Carburettor R9086. Gasket for carburettor R9091c.

‘Romanian Third and Sixth Divisions. First Corps. Corps of course may be quite differently composed if the day comes, but we know the present divisions and their commanders. Now let's see what the Czechs can contribute!'

‘Too many Cs around,' Georges said.

‘Ah, yes! Now what would Kren have done? Try S for Slovakia!'

‘Only two Ss in the whole list. Petrol tank S9228. Petrol tank complete S9299.'

‘No divisions at all? It's impossible. And there is no Ninth Division. Lukash told us it was broken up, so Kren knew that we know it. Complete? God, he means the whole bloody army! Well, that's the optimism of hatred. Impossible to guarantee! But it does mean wholesale surrenders and chaos at GHQ.'

‘And only one Hungarian division?' Zia asked indignantly. ‘You told Georges to look for 3A, not H. That's what started you off.'

‘Let me see. Stud for throttle lever. Nut for throttle lever. Washer for throttle lever. Zia, I am proud to announce that as well as the Third Armoured you are offering us Second and Third Corps.'

Zia jumped in her chair and called like a silver cavalry trumpet that they were worth all the rest.

‘We are talking of a Europe to be, Miss Terezia, not gallant Magyars on bay mares. Patriotism, as another lady said, is not enough. Do you fully realise what you and Georges have delivered? I could crack it only because I was ready for it. These are the units which are ready to come over to us in battle if corps and divisional staffs in what your uncle called the Club can carry the regimental officers. And they must be pretty sure they can.'

‘But Kren could have posted the brochures in Brussels,' Georges said.

‘Yes, if the Club had known the right address. As it was, they could only have ended up in somebody's waste paper basket.'

‘And yet you all keep on talking as if my life were in danger.'

‘It's in less danger than anyone's in Europe, Georges. The KGB must have you alive at all costs.'

‘Why should they assume that I know all these military details which I can't remember anyway?'

‘They cannot assume that you don't. You would be in front of your interrogators right now, my lad, if this Appinger had had enough time and had not been forced to use Fyster-Holmes and a scratch organisation. Then there's the little matter of Rippmann. Only an experienced agent could have recognised him.'

‘You have to protect him,' Zia insisted, shrill with guilt. ‘It's the least you can do.'

‘Not my department, Zia. And Gerald can't because Georges is as badly wanted by the police as you are. I rather think we should call on your old friends, Bridge Holdings.'

‘Oh, not Herbert Spring again!'

‘He might know the right people to return you to Budapest.'

‘I've burnt my passport.'

‘Just as well. It would show your visit to this country.'

‘I never remembered that! Oh, and I took such care with everything else.'

‘Zia, if secret agents never made simple mistakes they would never be caught at all. Now I was doing a bit of thinking while we were by the stream and I have some questions for Georges.'

Georges noticeably blushed and cleared his throat.

‘How tall is Appinger?'

‘About five foot nine I'd say.'

‘Long-legged? Short-legged?'

‘Short for his height.'

‘What time does the ice-cream van usually call at Alderton on a week day?'

‘Daisy would know. Get on to Paul and he'll find out for you.'

The colonel pressed a button on his desk and Sparks appeared, now looking unmilitary in blazer and checked trousers.

‘Sparks, you remember those marvellous Persian melons you gave me for Christmas?'

‘Glad you enjoyed 'em, sir.'

‘You mentioned that your father had friends in the trade.'

‘Yes. Started off as a porter and ended up a wholesaler in the old Covent Garden.'

‘Do you think he could sell off a barrow?'

‘Christ, yes! The old bugger would knock the rest of them for six.'

‘Reliable?'

‘In all but his scales, sir. But he can keep his mouth shut if that's what you mean.'

‘Tell him to hire a barrow, fill it up with flowers and fruit and stand by for orders. Expenses no object. Remuneration, whatever I can screw out of Gerald if he's still available. Will Pa play?'

‘Yes, sir. Ex CSM with Military Medal and bored at home.'

‘Just our man. Right! Lay on a lorry big enough to carry the barrow and Pa! When you have fixed the lot, tell me where to find you and I'll be with you early tomorrow morning. You two will be dropped at my flat. Here's the key and use it as your own. You may not see me or anyone for a couple of days, but don't go out on any account! Sparks will see that the larder is full and drink is there already.'

‘You are not married, colonel?' Zia asked.

An impertinence, but she was intensely curious. So masterful and attractive a man must surely have a woman of equal character.

‘Indeed I am, my dear—to MI(S). So be at ease and enjoy yourself, for it may be the last time you will ever see Georges Rivac.'

‘I will, wherever he is.'

‘You won't, wherever he is.'

‘It's a joke?' she asked, turning a little pale after her first flush of anger.

‘No. It would be serious and tragic for an ordinary citizen, but for a man whose home is all Europe, a man of courage and enterprise without attachments, it might be a bit of a joke.'

Nervously but firmly, as if that were an accusation, Georges retorted: ‘I am not . . . not any longer, I mean . . . not without attachments. They come first.'

‘They do, do they? Then you have both told me what I needed to be sure of. After all one can't in these days infer a damned thing from Daphnis and Chloe splendidly unembarrassed.'

‘But you said I should never see him again,' Zia reproached him.

‘I said you would never see Georges Rivac again.'

In the back of that closed and saving truck Sparks drove them away. No questions were asked except by Sparks who wanted to know what he should buy for dinner and breakfast. Questions among these professionals were so obviously futile and would remain with courteous but unenlightening replies. Even when he told them they had arrived, all they could see was a small square of Georgian houses with a railed and formal garden in the middle of it. The number was 18 and there was a scent of evening lime trees. Name of square unknown. To Georges's eye it could be nowhere else but London.

Mannering's flat on the second floor was highly civilised compared to what he had called his second home. When Sparks had left they explored, hand in hand, two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen-dining room. Zia had expected some bachelor's pad, comfortable as a club and severe in its furnishings. Colour and arrangement all showed a woman's hand. The colonel was undoubtedly a man of taste, but not that kind of taste. In each room was a single bed. In one of them marks on the carpet suggested that there had once been a double bed.

‘His wife must have left him,' Zia said. ‘That's why he snubbed me by saying he was married to MI(S).

She was irritated by her own feminine curiosity which there were few clues to satisfy. In the other bedroom, plainly that used by the colonel himself, was a photograph of a glorious fair-haired woman in her early thirties and a glossy print of a press photograph showing Russian tanks rumbling into the main square of a city she recognised as Prague.

‘1968,' Georges remarked. ‘You wouldn't think he would need that reminder even in his bedroom.'

They left the problem alone as tiredness overwhelmed them. Relaxation there could not be. In foreign uniform, in doubtful safety and with no sure future, all that their temporary refuge allowed was tiredness. They ate a few biscuits, swallowed some wine and collapsed into bed, he in Mannering's, she in the other. If the double bed had still been on its marks they would not have taken it. They were finished, a collection of limbs stripped of humanity and emotion.

The morning was dull and raining, a milder return to the weather when they had sailed from Calais. They were no longer stimulated by one desperate day after another and too conscious of a nameless prison at the mercy of men whose kindness might be only to keep them quiet. They could not manage more than a strained cheerfulness for Sparks who came in with a shopping basket of food varied and plentiful enough for a small restaurant. Zia maintained at least her curiosity.

‘I hope the colonel's wife won't mind our being here,' she said.

‘I never met her, Miss, but I think she'd like it. She died in 1968.'

‘Prague?' Georges asked.

‘Prague, mate. She got in the way of a Russian tank. Inconvenient for them that was. So they gathered up any awkward corpses and carted 'em off. It's all he ever knew.'

‘She was . . . well, on business? And a Czech?'

‘On holiday, Miss, seeing her parents,' Sparks replied uncompromisingly.

When Sparks had gone, Georges remarked:

‘That's why he keeps the photograph—her only grave. Sometimes I wonder whether we are helping or making matters worse.'

‘He doesn't wonder,' Zia said. ‘And Kren didn't.'

Georges examined with interest the basket left in the kitchen.

‘Forget it, my darling! Look at all this and cheer up! He would never go to such trouble if he meant to let us down.'

‘And I'm hopeless in the kitchen.'

‘There are still family cooks in Hungary?'

‘Yes, when they are old friends like ours.'

‘If mademoiselle will wait in the bar, lunch will be ready in half an hour.'

‘Where did you learn?'

‘Trial and error. A woman won't go to much trouble for herself. A man will. And ten times more for Zia, my Zia.'

After Georges's lunch, matched to the colonel's admirable claret, there was no difficulty in finding an occupation for the rest of the day. Uniforms hurled away, they returned to their only civilian suits of sleek skin. In the morning his room, being the nearest, was selected; in the afternoon Zia's siesta was interrupted in the other. At dusk the colonel's softest armchair led to a delightful interlude with a long night and a single bed to follow.

Sanity returned with the sun. Day stretched ahead again with nothing to do but look out of the window and wish for more freedom as a setting for the freedom to love. One distraction was fright when a police car stopped two doors away; another when an old gentleman bird-watching in the garden raised his binoculars to observe Zia at the window, a third when Sparks knocked and entered immediately, forcing Georges to rush for a bath towel and Zia—since the colonel had no discoverable dressing gown—for a pair of his pyjamas.

Sparks did not turn a hair, saying with what seemed the constant ability of MI(S) to deal with any situation, that he had always heard that WRAC uniform was scratchy till the girls got used to it. He added to Georges:

‘But what I've come to tell you is that three gentlemen will be calling this evening. So you mustn't be improperly dressed on parade, mate.'

They were not. Since time had somehow to be passed, Georges became more ambitious in the kitchen taking a good two hours to prepare lunch while Zia listened, first with alarm and then amusement, to the normal flow of excited curses from the craftsman. It was, she decided, too distracting an occupation and would be allowed no oftener than once a month in future. What future and how far away?